This was my third VeTSS Summer School, hosted this year at the University of Exeter. As always, it mixed theoretical, practical, and interactive lectures with something just as valuable: time to meet other PhD students and early-career researchers working on related problems.

The long lunch breaks were especially useful. Conversations with researchers from different areas made me look at verification from new directions, with different assumptions and motivations. They also helped me see the field beyond my own PhD project and meet people I may collaborate with in the future.

One talk close to my research was “Formal Methods for Safe Reinforcement Learning” by Dr Edwin Hamel-De le Court. It gave an accessible introduction to model checking, temporal logic, and reinforcement learning before showing how these areas are beginning to intersect. It was a good example of what VeTSS Summer School does well: introduce important ideas without assuming everyone already works on them.

My favourite talk was Professor Tom Chothia’s “Analysis of EMV Payment Security: The Case for Curiosity-Driven Cyber Security Research.” He introduced it as the equivalent of watching Star Wars on the last day of a module, and it delivered.

The talk began with a timely question: what should motivate researchers in an age when AI can already perform parts of the research process? His answer centred on curiosity. He then traced how card-payment systems work and described vulnerabilities his group had found in EMV payment protocols, including attacks demonstrated on a locked iPhone and an offline Square reader. The second half moved from these real-world attacks to formally modelling protocols, showing how verification can uncover subtle flaws in systems we use every day.

The summer school was not only lectures. There was the usual pub night and, despite the organisers having already supplied basically unlimited pizza, we still went for a second dinner. The next evening we joined a “Ghosts & Legends tour” of Exeter. Watching a theatrical ghost tour with a group of formal-methods researchers added its own kind of comedy to an otherwise horror-themed tour.

After the school ended, two other attendees and I made a short trip to Exmouth for a few hours on the beach before returning to Exeter for the last train home.

Three VeTSS summer schools in, and I highly recommend it. The lectures are excellent, but the real value is the community: meeting people who approach similar problems differently, discovering areas beyond your own work, and forming connections that may last well beyond a PhD.

And occasionally, there are ghosts.

By Abhinandan Pal (Obi)